Over the last few years, I’ve written a lot about degrowth ideology, the view that the only way to save the planet is to abandon economic growth as an objective. Degrowthers sometimes say uncontroversial things like that GDP isn’t the only thing that matters in the world and sometimes say more controversial ones like that you don’t need or deserve a washing machine, air conditioning, or out-of-season fruits and vegetables.

I have two major disagreements with degrowthers. The first is that I think they’re wrong about how to save the planet: Many countries have successfully cracked the code to increasing prosperity without increasing carbon emissions, and continuing down that pathway seems promising. The second is that we live in a democracy, and it’s hard to find anything that polls as badly as trying to shrink the economy. Most voters consistently rank the economy as their highest concern. If your plan to fix the world requires making their lives concretely poorer, then your plan will lose at the ballot box.

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I’ve been thinking about this this week because I think we are witnessing the birth of right-wing degrowth, which has all of the same flaws as........

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